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No Grades, No Studying

By

Christopher Shea

Oct 14, 2011 9:48 am ET

Some of the nation’s top business schools allow their students to opt out of revealing grades to potential employers. The idea is to encourage intellectual risk-taking: Rather than hoarding A’s in easier courses, students might tackle that advanced econometrics course that will push the limits of their comfort with math.

Unfortunately, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, “that dynamic has not always occurred,” according to a new study, by Daniel Gottlieb and Kent Smetters, who teach at Penn’s Wharton School. That seems to be putting it mildly:

“In practice, self-reported levels of learning effort have fallen significantly since the introduction of grade nondisclosure,” Mr. Gottlieb and Mr. Smetters write. They note that at Wharton, for example, students reported having spent 22 percent less time on academics in the four years after a grade nondisclosure policy was put in place.

The more you think about it, the more complex this game of signaling comes to seem: